


and twice as bright

by endquestionmark



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 13:09:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9492611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: “F— ah,fuck,” Eiffel says.Rustle of fabric. Skin on skin, slick.“Eiffel.” Very quiet, hardly audible through the echoes. “What is it like?”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set from day 486 of the Hephaestus Mission to day 496. For episode purposes, this begins a few days after Ep. 4 ("Cataracts and Hurricanoes"), contains a brief offscreen interlude for Ep. 5 ("Cigarette Candy"), and ends before Ep. 6 ("Super Energy Saver Mode"). If you want to contest these numbers, file your complaint directly in the trash.

Intercom chime. Day four hundred and eighty-six. Red light creeping around the edges of the viewport shade, livid and borderline cartoonish.

“Officer Eiffel,” Hera says, and he rolls over and cracks his elbow against the wall. Upsides of zero gravity: it's actually really, really hard to fall out of bed. Downsides: now he can make painful contact with any surface in the room, instead of the usual one and four probable halves.

“What?” he says. “I'm up.” Eiffel holds his arm to his chest. “Man. If I actually break my arm off one of these days, do you think they'll let me go full Ash and replace it with a chainsaw or something? Or, hey, what about that carbine? No way for that to go wrong, right? It's space. Either you die a horrible grisly death during the cold open or you get a new and improved robot limb and an inexhaustible supply of punchy one-liners to deploy as you fight your way through waves of, uh, anyway.” Quick breath, not quite deep enough, so his voice comes out rough: “Hi. What's up?”

Pause. “This wouldn't happen if you followed standard protocol for sleeping arrangements, you know,” Hera says. Faint glitch, echoing off the paneling: _standard protocol_. “Pryce and Carter's Deep Space—”

“Pryce and Carter never had to sleep rigged up like a mountaineer trying to take a nap on the Matterhorn.” Rustle of synthetic blankets, more plastic than cloth. He stretches and drifts gently away from the alcove of his bunk, bedding following after until he disentangles himself and shoves it back into place. “Call me a prude, but I just can’t get comfortable in full-body restraints.”

“They aren’t restraints.” Echo: _aren’t_. “They exist so that you don’t, as you so memorably put it, _actually break your arm off one of these days_.” His words, his intonation, only slightly exaggerated to show that she’s making fun of him.

Sometimes Eiffel wonders where Hera picked up sarcasm, if it was the result of whatever they do to give autopilot units their own unique personalities or if somewhere along the line she got sick of being the smartest one in the room — so to speak — and decided to make sure nobody ever asked her to run yet another routine diagnostic without thinking twice.

He hangs there in the middle of his quarters, oriented on an axis that isn’t quite vertical or even parallel to that of their orbit, and looks at nothing in particular. It took him ages to learn, when he was first deployed to the Hephaestus, was one of the hardest habits to pick up when it comes to talking to somebody who isn’t physically anywhere, but is also: everywhere? Eiffel tries not to think about it too much. He knows just how many logic holes he can poke into his brain before it goes full Jenga, and nobody wants that. At least he doesn’t think they do. It would be too easy. Too quick. Goddard Futuristics likes to play the long game. The very long game, without gravity or real coffee or sleeping arrangements that won’t kill him one day. Back to matters at hand. Eiffel rubs at his elbow. It doesn’t help. “So this protocol,” he says. “Does it involve restraining me?”

Beat. “It involves keeping you from battering the more vital elements of your delicate human anatomy against the unforgiving metal plating that constitutes everything else on the station.” Echo: _vital_. Echo: _everything else_. “Via the use of restraining mechanisms.”

“So,” he says, drawing out the word until the vowel stretches like taffy, like old electrical tape, loses all of its shape and distinctness. “That’s a yes.”

Sigh. “It’s a _yes, but for your own good,_ ” Hera says. “Are you awake enough to have a coherent conversation yet, or are those random free-association neurons going to keep firing until you run out of cheap shots?”

“Hey!” He snags a handhold and pulls himself closer to the viewport, blinking in the glare. “I save all my most expensive shots for you.”

Sigh again. Eiffel keeps meaning to ask about that as well. He doesn’t know if it would be insensitive. Probably, but then he’s a communications officer, not a diplomat, and the name is kind of a dead giveaway. His job is to communicate, especially when he has questions, and sometimes even more especially when the questions might have touchy answers. Somebody on the Hephaestus has to blunder around until they stumble upon the secrets of the universe, and it may as well be him. For a start, Hera doesn't breathe, so how does she always manage to find a spare sigh for whenever he says something particularly stupid or has a particularly bad idea? Was she programmed with nonverbal vocalizations just in case every human language on the planet, and a few besides, just couldn't cut it? Break glass in case of sarcasm, that kind of thing. Pull in case of supreme idiocy. For use in case of communications officers only. No echo this time. He grins.

“Sure.” The star seethes, and even through half a foot of safety glass he can see the gas boiling off its surface, its storms, its roiling nuclear glare. “Hey, Hera, what would happen if you dropped the shields or whatever? Opened up the sunroof to get a bracing first-tin-can-from-the-sun tan?”

“Hmm,” she says. Crackle of static. “Your skin would begin to blister and your core temperature would rise at rates typically not seen outside most nuclear reactor cores, interrupting most of your vital functions, and I _think_ the fluid in your eyeballs would boil sooner rather than later, but on the bright side you wouldn’t live long enough to worry about radiation poisoning.” Beat. “Probably.”

Probably. Hera could calculate the chances, if he asked. She almost definitely knows them already and just isn’t telling him. “You charmer,” he says. “Okay, consider me as coherent as you’re ever going to get. What’s up?”

“The average amount of time you spend in the shower has decreased by thirty percent in the last three days.” Echo: _decreased_. “I wanted to let you know that your consideration for the other members of the crew, as well as the decreased strain on the drainage and water recycling systems, is much appreciated.” Echo: _consideration._ Eiffel learns about new kinds of sarcasm every day.

He blinks. “Happy to help?”

“Of course,” she goes on, all honeyed harmonics, “it’s also worth considering whether this has anything to do with the incapacitation of your dominant hand.”

“Uh.” Expectant pause. Eiffel tries to think of someplace for the conversation to go that isn’t where he suspects it is, and comes up short. “Yes?” Voice a little too high, a little too hesitant. “What about it?”

“Officer Eiffel,” Hera says, and he fights the urge to cover his face with his hands. For God’s sake, he’s a grown man, and it isn’t as if Hera is about to say: “Surely you recognize the additional challenge presented by filtering excess biological matter out of the water reuptake.”

“Hera!” Halfway to a whine. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“Do you have to spend nearly a third of your daily shower engaged in manual self-stimulation if you barely even seem awake enough to enjoy it?” Echo: _nearly a third_.

“You make it sound so biological!” His face is heating up now. “Wait. Does that mean you’re watching me? Wait, thirty percent? Does that mean you have a baseline? How _long_ have you been watching me?”

Beat. Another beat. “It _is_ biological.”

Eiffel gives in and presses his face into his hands, says — a little muffled — “Kind of noticing a lack of response to my other questions, there.”

“What other questions.” No echo. If Eiffel is a worse liar than a literal supercomputer, he’ll never live it down.

“The—” Pause. “The part where—” Between his fingers, Eiffel stares at the corner of the room as if he’ll find a slightly less mortifying way to ask wedged between the paneling. No such luck. He gives up. It’s not like he knows what he wants the answer to be anyway. “Never mind.”

“Hmm,” Hera says. Faint thrum, smoothed into discrete tones, like an echo made of glass. “Anyway! We in the central computer system of the U.S.S. Hephaestus thank you for altering your daily routine and strongly request that you sustain these behavioral modifications for the foreseeable future.”

“Sure.” Eiffel stares at the corner a little more. “Wait, what? No! Wait! What?” Silence. “No! No way. Hera? No way!” More silence. Sometimes he wonders what Hera would do if she wanted to convey a shrug. He suspects that she is doing it now, and soldiers on anyway. Nothing for it now but to brazen his way through. “One of my few reliable sources of joy,” he says, face burning, “out of the incredibly limited number of things that get me up in the morning — although does it even really count as morning when the star just keeps doing its Eye of Sauron impression around the merry clock? Which, by the way, is just part of the problem here on the U.S.S. 30 Days Of Day — is the fact that this station is so oversized and oversupplied that if I want to spend an extra ten minutes in the shower, just an extra ten minutes! Like a normal human with a pulse and a limbic system and _needs_ , okay! Then I can take my ten minutes, and my thirty-percent-longer shower, and my soundproofed shower booth, and I can make my day just a little less miserable! Is that really too much to ask?”

Silence.

“Oh, God,” he says. Out of breath, so his voice comes out squeaky and small. “Did I really just say all of that?”

“You absolutely did.” Hera sounds far too amused. “Anything you'd like to add?” Echo: _anything_.

“Uh.” He still sounds small. To Hera, though, he probably always sounds like that. “No?” Elongated vowel, vocalized question. “No.”

“So now I can tell you that the showers definitely aren't soundproofed,” she says.

Long, long silence.

Hera breaks it first. “I'll just give you a minute.” Echo: _just give_.

Silence again, except for the hum of the station's life support systems and the far-off echo of voices, or maybe the station is settling, hull plates shifting as the star's heat flares and ebbs. Just because Hera is quiet doesn’t mean that she isn’t there. Eiffel knows that. Just because the station is big doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t always listening. Not soundproofed, Jesus. Three days ago, Eiffel thought he was going to drown in his own spacesuit, surrounded on all sides by too much vacuum to comprehend. If he had cracked his faceplate, poked a single microscopic hole in the fabric of his glove, he would have vented the cooling system into space, and then he would have drowned in space instead, but it still throws him more to know that the showers aren’t soundproofed. On a personal level, it even offends him more, and Eiffel was pretty outraged about the prospect of drowning in outer space to begin with.

Slide of skin against metal, rasp of fabric. Eiffel surreptitiously sniffs at his flight suit and deems it acceptable.

“If you’re trying to ascertain whether Commander Minkowski will be offended by your personal hygiene, I could perform an analysis of the atmosphere around you,” Hera says. Echo: _ascertain_. Echo: _personal hygiene_. Eiffel zips up his flight suit a little too quickly.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Clang of fingers against handholds. He pulls himself to the door, not mindful enough of his still-aching shoulder, and pain flares along his collarbone. “Remind me to ask Hilbert if he has anything for persistent pain as a side effect of nearly getting my arm pulled off.”

“I recommend immobility.” The sort of pause where it sounds like Hera would be holding her breath, if she could.

Eiffel narrows his eyes. “You’re kidding.”

“Your cooperation is greatly appreciated,” she says. No echo.

“Hera,” he says, and she snorts. These days, Eiffel can’t tell if Hera is programmed to sound like a person or if he’s so used to it that he can’t imagine how else she would sound. Not that it matters either way. It’s not like he’s ever known anyone else like her. “I knew it!”

“No, seriously,” Hera says. Harmonic thrum behind the words, as if she’s trying not to laugh. “Ask Dr. Hilbert.”

“I really don’t want to do that!”

“There you go.” Echo: _go_. “You’ll just have to trust me.”

He pushes up his sleeves. Whisper of fabric. “With my life, yes. With this?” He puts on his best Jack Benny voice. Clipped vowels, faux exasperation, delivered with just enough conviction to cover up the petulance still threatening to take over his voice. “I’m thinking it over!”

“There’s still hot water left.” Echo: _still_. Odds are pretty good Hera isn’t lying this time, which Eiffel didn’t even know she could do. Maybe it’s a chain of command thing. He should probably be more insulted by that.

“No thanks,” he says, and swings the hatch open. “I’ll take my chances with the wrath of Minkowski.”

“Past data,” Hera begins, and Eiffel nearly slams the hatch on his own fingers.

“No!” he says. “No past data!” Deep breath, slow exhale. “Hera.”

“Yes?”

“I think I’ve had just about as much past data about my personal habits as I can handle in one day.”

“Of course.” She sounds positively complacent. “In that case—”

“Hera,” Eiffel says, aware that he’s being short with her, but it’s been a long day, and he hasn’t even been awake for a full hour yet. “Not now, okay? Just give me a couple of minutes here.”

“Certainly, Officer Eiffel,” she says, and subsides into silence.

“Just ten minutes,” he mutters, “and we’d all be a little bit happier.”

Silence.

Faint hum of life support, distant echoes, hiss of air circulation. Far below, the intermittent rumble of engines, course corrections by thousandths of a degree. Far above, the beep of readouts.

All around, static, and beneath it: silence.

 

* * *

 

Intercom chime. Day four hundred and eighty-seven. Same walls, same red light, same crack of bone against unpadded metal when Eiffel rolls over. Same bruise on the same spot, more dusky than livid these days. “Hera,” he says, holding his arm to his chest. “There _has_ to be something we can do about that.”

“Hmm,” she says. No _good morning_ , because it doesn't count as morning. Not that it would matter to her either way. Does she sleep? Eiffel keeps meaning to ask. “I know. You could use the Pryce and Carter-recommended protocol for sleeping arrangements in crew quarters!”

Beat. Eiffel blinks at the ceiling. The floor? The wall. It doesn't matter. “Or I could not do that,” he says. “I don't like feeling like, well, a piece of equipment. I mean, that's what we do with, I don't know, screwdrivers! And I'm way more important than a screwdriver. Probably.” Beat. “You know what, don't tell me if I’m not.”

“Of course, Officer Eiffel.”

Silence. Rustle of synthetic blankets, clang of fingers against handholds, faint hollow scrape of hinges. Sudden emptiness of a much bigger space, faint hum, distant echoes, all made less abstract by the presence of a single body as Eiffel makes his way from the crew quarters — otherwise empty — to the shower rooms. The closest set have been broken for sixteen days and counting. The next closest are five minutes away, closer to engineering than anything else, but at least they never run short of hot water as a result. Eiffel might not get to enjoy anything else, but he'll be damned before he gives up the once-in-a-while luxury of a hot shower on days when he manages to get up early enough.

Habit is a hell of a thing. Hot water, even if it tends to bead up on the walls of the stall, and the humid closeness of the air, and the novelty of an atmosphere that isn't rarefied within an inch of its life. It might be habit or it might be reflex or maybe it's some kind of twisted self-inflicted Pavlovian conditioning, but the moment the water clicks on, Eiffel's libido perks up and takes a sudden interest in proceedings.

“No,” he says out loud, and closes his eyes, turning into the spray before the droplets lose momentum and begin to drift. It doesn't help. His dick twitches against his thigh. He thinks about how easy it would be, how mindless, to just get off like he does every morning, biting down on the heel of his hand to keep quiet, but Hera would know, and—

Hera would know, and what? Make fun of him? She already does, in her all-knowing all-seeing matter-of-fact way. Retaliate? Possibly, but Eiffel can stand a cold shower or a brownout or two. Odds are those will happen anyway the next time the star flares up in a fit of combustive pique.

It would be so easy. Hera wouldn’t be surprised. She knows him too well for that: the aptitude-tested, barely-trained, Command-selected and institutionally-approved moron of their collective little jaunt into deep space. She knows, no doubt, that his heart rate is ticking ever so slightly upwards. She can hear the way his breathing has gone shallow. She understands what all of those mean, taken in conjunction, because Hera is smart and because she knows him, and because of that she would not be surprised, but — Eiffel thinks — she might be disappointed.

There it is. The heart of the problem, its nuclear core: Hera might be disappointed not as a stranger, but as a friend, as somebody who knows Eiffel and — every time he calls — is there.

(He knows he doesn’t have to call. If she were anybody else, though, he would. Besides, one day she might want to say _no, I’m not here, no, go away_. One day she might not want to answer. Eiffel doesn’t want to presume.)

It would be easy, and good, and he suddenly wants it more than anything else. All-consuming desire, the visceral kind that whispers: Go on. Floor the gas, make that jump, take that shot. There are no rules and nobody can stop you, and you can do whatever the fuck you want, and you can want whatever the fuck you want, and wouldn’t it be good? Wouldn’t it be worth it? Go on.

Yes and no. It wouldn’t and it would. The water beads on his skin, slides down the inside of the stall in slippery sheets, leaves iridescent trails of soap and tiny foamy bubbles in its wake. Eiffel can feel his pulse thrumming under his skin, blood-hot and urgent.

He takes a deep, ragged breath, rests one hand on the shower knob, and — before he can think twice —wrenches it over to the coldest setting available.

Space is very cold. When Hilbert talks about it, he goes on about entropy and the dispersion of energy and the tendency of all systems to revert to disorder, but what he really means is that space isn’t cold, it just lacks all heat. Eiffel isn’t really inclined to split hairs about it. What it comes down to for him is that the temperature of the water supply on the Hephaestus has a range that covers every point between nuclear core-heated and teetering right on the edge of flash-frozen.

By the time he gets out of the shower, Eiffel is shivering. Shallow breath, chattering teeth. No doubt Hera knows about that, too. No doubt she can track the precise trajectory of his plummeting body temperature and calculate how it correlates with the nose-dive his dignity has taken as well.

“Thirty percent,” he says. “Definitely not worth it.”

Hera, wisely, says nothing.

 

* * *

 

Intercom chime. Day four hundred and eighty-eight.

“Hera, are you there?” Silence. “What’s the status on those repairs Minkowski had me doing yesterday? All systems go? Pipes cleared out and everything?”

“All systems nominal.” Beat. “Perhaps that isn’t the best choice of idiom, Officer Eiffel.” Echo: _perhaps._

Snort. “You know me,” he says. Click of a wrench, creak of metal as he pries up a section of the deck. “Always taking suggestions.”

“Hmm.” Echo. “Preliminary analysis would suggest that this is the psychological phenomenon commonly referred to as projection, or—“

“I know what projection is!” He crosses his arms. “And I’m kind of busy right now.”

“Just a suggestion.” Silence. “Not that one. To your right. More to your right. There.”

Eiffel tightens the valve carefully. No point stripping its threads, not if he’s just going to have to redo these calibrations the next time Hilbert decides he needs additional oxygen flow to his lab in station off-hours and sends recirculation systems for the entire aft deck into a death spiral. “Right,” he says, and moves away. “How’s that?”

“Testing systems now.” Hiss of air, faint but unmistakeable. “Not quite. Diagnostic readings indicate that the valve is still open.” Echo: _not quite_.

“Roger that.” Faint metallic scraping. Hera makes the noise that means she wants to say something, but isn’t sure whether she should. Eiffel tilts his head. “Everything okay?”

“Well,” she says. Echo. “It’s just — this isn’t rocket science, despite appearances to the contrary. These are routine repairs.” Echo: _despite appearances_. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” Beat. “Well, as fine as they usually are.” Beat. “Which I guess is not very fine, but considering that we’re eight light years from Earth and I’m still not sure what I’m actually doing here, I guess that’s as good as it gets, right?”

Beat. Far below, the rumble of engines. Far above, the faint hum of electricity, lights, static. Hera’s panopticon processor, her mainframe, her cathodic core. Beat.

“Actually, no!” Outrage and hysteria, in probably equal proportions. “No, everything is not all right! Everything is the opposite of all right, since you’re asking! I swear my elbow is going to actually fall off one of these days, and I’m kind of really over taking three-minute showers in water so cold it might as well be carbonite, and no matter how hard I wish, sometimes sucking on stale cigarettes just doesn’t do it for me!” Clang of the panel slamming shut. “ _Fuck!_ ”

“Officer Eiffel,” Hera says, a little more tentative.

Swearing, in a low continuous mutter. “I’m fine.” Hiss of pain. “Probably. God. Did you do that?”

“No.” Echo. “What I meant was, your core body temperature is three-tenths of a degree higher than usual. Are you feeling all right?”

“Wait, really?” For the last twelve hours, Eiffel has felt twitchy, out-of-his-skin antsy and overclocked and incessantly present, no matter how much he tries to distract himself with work or mind-numbing routine or even an idle war of attrition against the sticky note infestation that continues to darken his door. Minkowski is just going to have to start badgering him in person, as all effective and respectable nuisances do. Flowers and a note? No way. Eiffel isn’t that kind of girl. He won’t settle for anything less than the personal touch and besides, it’s kind of nice to get special attention, even if that comes in the form of Minkowski banging on his door and telling him to _come out, you can’t hide in there forever!_

It isn’t just that, of course, the system failures and the endless bureaucracy and the unrelenting austerity of living in space and subsisting on synthetic alternatives to everything good in life. It isn’t the way that Eiffel suspects he’s having an allergic reaction to something in the vents, or the way his throat keeps tickling as if he’s about to get sick, and if that’s because of the cold showers then that’ll just be the cherry on top.

Eiffel doesn’t think he’s been hard this often since he was a teenager.

Yes, it’s only been two days. Yes, he likes to think he has a little more self-control than that. Yes, he should get a fucking grip and get on with his life, but there it is, an undercurrent running through every fucking waking moment, underscoring everything he does. Eiffel feels like he might be running a low-grade fever, thinks that another few days of this might drive him out of his mind, never mind a week. Never mind any more than that.

“Yes,” Hera says. “Your core temperature is slightly raised and has been for the last twelve hours. It could just be a case of normal cyclic variation, but I would recommend consulting Dr. Hilbert according to protocol for anomalous physiological symptoms on long-term missions.” Echo: _slightly raised_. Echo: _anomalous_.

“Sure.” Eiffel doesn’t think Hilbert will tell him anything he doesn’t already know. “Maybe he can help with the cigarettes thing.” Hilbert would probably be happy to help with any of his symptoms — Eiffel winces — but his idea of a cure might be worse than just toughing it out.

“Would you like me to inform Dr. Hilbert that you plan to stop by?” Echo: _like_.

“Sure,” Eiffel says, though it comes out rough. He clears his throat and tries again. “Sure. Thanks, Hera.”

“My pleasure.”

No echo.

 

* * *

 

Intercom chime. Day four hundred and eighty-nine.

“Are you feeling better, Officer Eiffel?” No echo.

Yes and no, is the real answer. Yes, because for once the most urgent of his mental impulses has nothing to do with nicotine cravings; no, because, well. Two days was bad. Three days is worse.

Also no because the tickling in his throat has escalated to low-grade roughness and pain at all times, and Eiffel suspects that at any moment it’ll manifest as a full-blown cough, but that seems secondary.

“Yeah,” he says. Even that single syllable catches on its way out, and there it is, there’s the cough. He hacks for a moment until his airway clears, one hand on the communications console to steady himself. “Definitely better. You’d think if Hilbert could whip up nicotine lozenges this easily, he’d have coffee _down_ by now.”

“You don’t sound better,” Hera observes. Echo: _sound_. “Would you like me to run a basic physiological scan—”

“No!” Almost a shout. “No,” Eiffel amends, at a more respectable volume. “I’ll just let Hilbert keep doing his thing. I mean, he’s a doctor, right? He knows what he’s doing.” Hera might track his core temperature as a matter of course, but it doesn’t mean Eiffel has to let her know just how close he is at any moment to embarrassing himself, one way or another, or just how badly he wants it, or just how damnably human he really is. It doesn’t mean Eiffel has to hand her the keys to the kingdom. She has them anyway.

“Of course.” Echo.

He feels feverish. His skin feels oversensitized, overheated, unshielded. Even the faint current of air recirculation threatens to make him shiver, raises goosebumps, and Eiffel wants to cross his arms across his chest, but that might be too much. That might just make it worse.

Hera has to know. She has to be aware of what this is doing to him. But she doesn’t say anything, and Eiffel doesn’t break the silence either. He just does his job and records his log and does his paperwork and gets through another day and burns up, so slowly and surely that he thinks his fingertips should strike sparks off the console.

One deep, unsteady breath. One more, a little steadier. Two, shallow but even. Three, almost back to normal. Five, barely audible.

Fade out.

 

* * *

 

Intercom chime. Day four hundred and ninety-six.

“Officer Eiffel,” Hera says.

Silence.

“Officer Eiffel, your shift begins in fifteen minutes. If you want to have time for a shower before you report to the bridge, you should get up sometime in the next ninety seconds.”

Silence.

“Eiffel, are you all right?”

Low groan. “Give me a second.” On the one hand, it’s nice to have a consistently clear airway and not cough up his lungs on an hourly basis. On the other hand, now that his physiology is back to more-or-less uninfected normal, all its resources have apparently been diverted back to the other most pressing matter at hand. Namely, his hindbrain; namely, as it pertains to his dick, and for fuck’s sake, this is getting ridiculous. It has long since gotten ridiculous. It shouldn’t be getting to Eiffel as much as it clearly is, but the nice thing about running a high fever is that it doesn’t leave one’s limbic system with a lot of spare time to spend on inconvenient, persistent boners.

“Eiffel.” Hera says his name quietly, and it echoes.

One of these days, Eiffel will figure out what that means, why her voice hitches on some words and not others, but today he just wants to be left alone. He just wants to wallow in his too-human, biologically-mandated, fleshly misery. What he actually wants is to get in the shower and soap up and jerk off until he sprains something or goes blind, either way, but since that isn’t an option he’ll settle for making everybody else miserable.

“I said give me a second,” he says, and Hera sighs.

“Eiffel.” No echo. “Go ahead. I won’t — I mean, I can’t actually leave you to it, but I can—” Pause. “I won’t look.”

Beat.

“Wait.” Rustle of synthetic blankets. “For real? I mean, you aren’t kidding? This isn’t some kind of twisted joke?”

“No.” Her voice is even, steady, but a faint thrum runs through it. “I mean it.”

Eiffel untangles himself from his bedding and shoves it out of the alcove so hard that it drifts across to the opposite wall before it flattens out, a crumpled mass against the paneling. “ _God_ ,” he says.

Rasp of a zipper, slide of tongue over skin, skin against fabric. Thump of his heel against the paneling as Eiffel braces himself in place, hand already working, and then thump of his head against the wall.

Long, ragged breath. Unmistakeable wet noises.

“F— ah, _fuck_ ,” Eiffel says.

Rustle of fabric. Skin on skin, slick.

“Eiffel.” Very quiet, hardly audible through the echoes. “What is it like?”

Abrupt intake of breath, halfway between a gasp and outright hyperventilation. “Hera,” he says. “Jesus.”

“I know,” she says. Echoes everywhere. “I know, I said, but you—” So disrupted that it barely sounds like a word. “I know your heart rate and your respiratory rate and I know what it sounds like when you’re angry or scared or sad, but it sounds different like this, and I don’t know if it’s because you aren’t thinking about anything else or because of some external factor or because of some human thing that I can’t even begin to parse, and I don’t know how it feels because I don’t have any kind of reference point for this, and I know there’s no way for you to explain it that’ll make sense to me, but I’ve never seen you like this, and that’s what I do.” Static. “I look and I listen and I keep track, and sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t, but sometimes it helps when you explain.” Static, but fainter this time. “So. Could you tell me? What it’s like?” Silence. “Please?”

Silence. Shallow, rough breathing.

“Hera.” Dry click as Eiffel swallows, unfamiliar breathy urgency to his voice. “If you keep talking, I won’t get the chance, darlin’.” He exhales, shaky and slow. “Like this? Messy.” Faint slippery sound. “No gravity means everything just sort of stays put unless you spread it around, and then it gets everywhere and it’s kind of wet and—” Beat. “—can I?”

“Go on.”

Resumption of movement. Corresponding uptick in sound. “It’s good,” Eiffel says, in a rush. “It’s really fucking good, God, could you keep talking? I mean, you don’t have to or anything, but.” Bitten-off groan. “It’s better. When you do.”

Static, but the sort that means Hera doesn’t know what to say. “What do you want me to talk about?”

“Anything. Talk about, I don’t know.” The sound he makes then is barely a word, more like _uhhh_ , like his entire body is turned to the same frequency. Like resonance, a spectral line, a clear signal.

“It sounds the way it does when you’re in pain.” Echo: _it sounds_. “I mean, _you_ sound the way you do when you’re in pain. Does it hurt?”

“No.” Pause. “Well, kind of? But not really, it’s more like. Ah, fuck. Like I know it’ll be good if I just keep going, right? And if I stop it’ll suck. And it feels good to keep going, and it’s not like I want to stop anyway, but it’s not even something I’m really thinking about, you know?”

“Like a reflex?”

“Yeah, like—” Acceleration of movement, sound. “Like you watching me, I guess. Because you’re doing, like, fifty other things at the same time, but you’re still here, talking to me. So I’m talking to you, right, but I’m also—” Whisper of skin against metal. His heel slips a little, but Eiffel barely bothers to correct it. He’s too close, spread too thin, too distracted. “—also.” The thought that Hera is expending barely a fraction of her computing power, if even that, on this conversation is a good one. It makes Eiffel feel small, inconsequential, reminds him of just how little he matters, how human he really is.

“Actually,” Hera says, and she almost sounds guilty. “I’m not really paying attention to anything non-essential right now.” Echo: _non-essential_. “But yes, I think I see.” Silence. “Eiffel?”

Long, low gasp. Disruption of rhythm; of breath, of movement. A new slick quality to the sound of skin on skin, slippery, wet, between his fingers, soaking into his flight suit. “Shit.” One word, at least three syllables. “God. Give a man a little warning next time.”

“What was that?” Echo: _was_. Hera sounds distressed. “Are you all right?”

Eiffel wipes his hand on the inside of his flight suit. “More than.” He pauses. “Why?”

“That was different!” Hera says. “Your systems went haywire. I didn’t know that was going to happen!” Echo: _didn’t know_. “You didn’t tell me about that!”

“I was a little distracted,” Eiffel says. “And yeah, that happens. I guess it’s one of those human things. Kind of like a crash? But in a good way.” He wrinkles his nose. His flight suit is probably a write-off, not that he’s been wearing it for the last two weeks or anything.

“That’s so confusing.” Hera sounds genuinely curious. “And it’s always like that?”

Eiffel laughs, low and fond. “Hell no,” he says. “That was something else, sweetheart.” He grins at nothing in particular. “I feel like I should be thanking you.”

Silence.

Intercom chime, echoing in the distance.

“That’ll be the Commander,” Eiffel says, just as Hera begins.

“No need,” she says, and pauses. After a moment: “You should probably shower.”

Eiffel smells his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “Guess so.”

Silence.

After another moment: “Officer Eiffel?”

“What is it, Hera?”

“If you ever wanted to provide some more data.” Echo: _some more_. “I think it would be a very valuable addition to my observations.” Echo: _my_.

“Hera,” Eiffel says, very slowly. “You sly all-seeing overlord, you. Is that a proposition?”

She sounds positively demure. “Just a recommendation, Officer Eiffel.” No echo. “Although the two may be considered synonymous.” Echo: _may be_.

“You know how hot and bothered I get whenever you break out the semantics, baby.”

“There’s still hot water left.”

“Hera!” He gapes. “What do you take me for?”

“Hmm,” she says. Very faint echo. “An opportunist?”

Creak of hinges. “You have me there,” Eiffel says. She can have him anywhere, for all he cares.

Sudden emptiness of a much bigger space, made that much less empty by the presence of a single body, made that less silent by two voices.

Faint hum of life support, distant echoes, hiss of water recirculation systems activating.

Quiet murmur of conversation.

Low laughter. Muffled gasp.

Silence.


End file.
